Posted on 08/12/2009 6:35:50 PM PDT by Kaslin
Watching the muscular tactics being used in congressional town meetings by some opponents of health care reform, I keep thinking somebody should remind the Republican leaders who are reveling in the scenes about Bruce Alger.
Alger was the first Republican congressman elected from Texas in the modern era, winning a Dallas district in 1954. In 1960, just a few days before the presidential election, he was part of a crowd of several hundred people who surrounded Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, and his wife, Lady Bird, when they arrived for a luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas.
Many of the demonstrators carried signs labeling the Texas senator as a "Judas." Alger's placard read: "LBJ Sold Out to Yankee Socialists."
As I later wrote, the Johnsons "were engulfed by the crowd, and for more than half an hour, were reviled and jostled as they slowly made their way across the lobby. Johnson refused offers of police assistance, telling an aide that 'if the time has come that I can't walk with my lady across the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel, then I want to know it.' "
The backlash was instant and powerful. As conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak later wrote in their book about Johnson, the scene in the Adolphus "outraged thousands of Texans and Southerners. Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, who had not campaigned for his party's national ticket since 1944, telephoned Johnson that evening to offer his services."
The Johnson biographers concluded that while no one could prove the case, it was "a credible hypothesis" that the Adolphus incident swung Texas and perhaps other closely contested Southern states to the Democrats.
In 1964, when Johnson headed the Democratic ticket, he got even: His coattails swept Alger out of office.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
In other news, polls are showing indiependants are very sympathetic towards the ‘protesters’.
” In other news, polls are showing indiependants are very sympathetic towards the ‘protesters’. “
Another pseudo-conservative pseudo-intellectual trying to tell us that what’s working won’t work....
It ain’t 1964.
Personally, I think all the calculated, carefully formulated responses are worse. People are emotional over their freedom as they should be. I saw a woman on the news yesterday crying and saying “where will we go for healthcare?”
Maybe it wasn’t a politically correct or sanctioned reaction but it was from the heart.
Broder is living in fantasyland. Obamacare is seeking, primarily because of the underhanded mendacity of the Democrats.
Sorry about the typo, I meant sinking.
What a crock! LBJ’s habit of stuffing ballot boxes in the Valley gave JFK the edge he needed to win, just as “the Miracle of Ballot Box 13” vote fraud in Jim Wells Co. had gotten him his Senate seat in 1949.
LBJ, the biggest crook in the history of Texas, should have been tarred and feathered instead of picketed at the Adolphus. That would have saved the country from his rancid legacy of Medicare (which he said would never cost more than $9 billion) and the disastrous War on Poverty, which has cost some $8 TRILLION in welfare programs in the past 40 years, and the Democrats are still whining about poverty.
So, it’s best not to do or say anything because something might happen.
This is an editorial in IBD?? I’m very disappointed in them. Furthermore, the roughing up has been coming from the other side.
Exactly. THAT South is long-gone. Sadly, I must add.
David Broder has been inside the Beltway for the last 50 years. He hasn’t a clue about the simmering anger outside of DC about Obamacare and the push toward socialism. Congress is despised. Their will be no backlash of sympathy.
Throw NORTH KOREA in that and you have a full house.
Thank You. We in the street are what is killing this bill. Not a bunch of snoids writing papers and talking on the boob tube. Pay no attention to lame brains on tv. Get to the street. Tally Ho. Nd Good Hunting.
You have to wonder if idiots like this are stupid enough to believe the crap they write....
Yet not a word about a black man passing out free banners being stomped by four goons in their purple SEIU shirts - funny what offends some people’s sensibilities......
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